Information is electronically presented to users of that information in a variety of ways. For example, a user may wish to view a document stored in an electronic format, such as a word processing document, a Portable Document Format (“.pdf”) document file, a Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”) document, or an Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) document. Such documents may be electronically transferred between users, via, for example, electronic mail (“email”) or the World Wide Web (“WWW”), or by some other type of computer network resources.
As another example, users often receive audio-visual information, in addition to (or as an alternative to) textual information. Such audio-visual information may be presented via a television or other display device, and may be formatted using an audio-visual format, such as the Moving Pictures Expert Group (“MPEG”) format.
Often when a user is presented with such information, in the above or other formats, it is the case that the user is unsure of whether he or she should devote time to understanding the information in its entirety. For example, a user may receive a lengthy email, or access a large document as part of a web page. In other cases, even if the user definitely wishes to read the information in its entirety, time constraints may not allow a full reading.